Meet the browser: Opera Next

By bangbang023
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Grand Master

Quillz

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Yupe, they do :) Usually takes a couple days, but they do

Cool, thanks for the info. I haven't used Opera in a long while, but I'm giving 12.x a try.

The only thing that bothers me is Opera Link... It never seems to sync up properly. I'll delete, say 20+ bookmarks, and the next time I launch Opera, they'll all back, even though I don't want them back.

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wellofsouls

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Cool, thanks for the info. I haven't used Opera in a long while, but I'm giving 12.x a try.

The only thing that bothers me is Opera Link... It never seems to sync up properly. I'll delete, say 20+ bookmarks, and the next time I launch Opera, they'll all back, even though I don't want them back.

I think there was such a bug in certain past builds, and the fix was to manually delete them from the web interface of Opera Link. And I think that bug was patched quite some time ago already.

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Marshall Veteran

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A shining new [bookmark] star

There is a new star in town! and it is located right there in your address field! You can now easily add and remove a page from your bookmarks. This is not a full bookmark manager (which we still have in the Bookmark menu and as a panel) but a quick and easy way to save a page for later. You can also add and remove a page from your Speed Dial page.

61503285.png

The star will light up in the address field when you visit a page that is either bookmarked or is a Speed Dial. We have experimented with a similar UI in Opera 9 Technical Preview 1 almost six years ago. We have revamped this popular request and hope you will all like our new take on it.

Download & Blog

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+Frank B. Subscriber²

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An updated Core, with Ragnarök and CSS3 radial gradients

We have a rather interesting new snapshot for you today. It includes an update to our Core rendering engine (Presto) to version 2.9.220, and with that come some really big improvements.

Firstly, this is the first snapshot to include Ragnarök! For those of you who haven't tested our earlier Labs builds, Ragnarök is the name of our implementation of the HTML5 Parsing algorithm. As Bruce Lawson explained previously, "The HTML5 specification defines a set of parsing rules for all markup, whether valid or invalid. Once all browsers have HTML5 parsers, the same markup will produce the same DOM across all conforming browsers.". If you would like to know more, you should also read our initial announcement, from the first Labs release.

The other big Core change is that we have improved our CSS3 gradient support. We already supported CSS3 linear gradients and now we have added support for CSS3 radial gradients.

Besides these major improvements, the Core team have also done a lot of site compatibility work. Together these Core updates should mean that Opera renders your favorite sites better than ever!

Finally, we also have a nice selection of important desktop improvements (I personally like the new on-demand plug-in activation) and bug fixes. As always, see the change log below for a full overview. And once you are done with that, download and get on with testing!

Known issues

  • No 64-bit FreeBSD packages this time (they will return in a future snapshot)
  • Tab stack extender is not working outside visual tab mode
  • Known issues from the last snapshot

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Source: Opera Desktop Team blog

Downloads:

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x-byte

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Featherweight and plugin installation improves, plus important fixes

Mondays are often depressing, so here is a new build with improvements to our Featherweight skin to help lighten your day. smiley.gif Some of the highlights are:

  • The icons have been polished and aligned
  • Badge graphic has been tuned
  • The panel now blends with the active tab
  • Tuned colorization on Windows and Linux to blend more with the platform colors
  • New URL drop down look, with easier to use search suggestions

Here are a couple of screen shots from Mac and Windows. Can you spot the changes? smiley.gif

0windows.png0mac.png

Here is a view with the panel showing. This time I'll highlight the change for you. smiley.gif

mac-panels.png

Additionally, we have also done a fair amount of work on our auto-update and plugin installation features, and fixed a handful of annoying recent regressions. smiley.gif

For a more complete list of changes, scroll down to the change log below.

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

Read More...

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wellofsouls

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http://my.opera.com/...-opera-12-alpha

Introducing Opera 12 alpha

The last months Opera 12 snapshots have received two major updates of its JavaScript engine, Carakan, which make it more memory efficient and fully ECMAScript 5.1 compliant. Last week the new HTML 5 parser Ragnarök was added. Today Opera 12 alpha introduces another major technological milestone: full hardware acceleration with WebGL.

WebGL

WebGL in combination with new ECMAscript features like type arrarys makes it possible to develop and run games with high quality graphics in your browser. To demonstrate the possibilities of these new technologies Opera has ported the game Emberwind to HTML5. There are several other demos like Formula 1 and Don't click.

Full hardware acceleration

Opera aims to give the best possible performance for all users. This is why we already have a "software accelerated" backend in Vega. However with the new hardware accelerated backend Opera will draw the whole user interface using the GPU, not just specific elements of the webpage like the canvas element. This will offload the CPU significantly and make it possible to accelerate the rendering of all webpages. On systems with outdated drivers or buggy graphics cards, Opera will fallback to the heavily optimized Vega software rendering engine.

Currently hardware acceleration is in an alpha stage and only uses an OpenGL backend. We would like to get your feedback about how well it works for you. Opera 12 alpha works best with modern graphics cards and up to date drivers. In future snapshot we'll add support for DirectX and more graphics cards. Be aware that testing Opera 12 alpha can trigger bugs in your graphics card and in worst case blue screen your computer.

Themes

Opera 12 makes it easier than ever to personalize your browser. It's now possible to create simple lightweight themes based on a nice photos or other graphics. It's also easier to install and try out new and existing themes (previously called skins). Try them out here! (currently only available for Windows & Mac).

Have fun test driving Opera 12 alpha!

WARNING: This is an Opera 12.00 Alpha build: It is not feature complete and may have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. If you are uncomfortable with this, please use the latest stable Opera instead.

Download

Windows

Mac

Linux/FreeBSD

Full Hardware Acceleration and WebGL, wow!!! :drool: (Y)

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x-byte

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Hardware acceleration fixes

This is the first snapshot after Opera 12 Alpha. A big thank you goes out to everyone who joined us on the far side of software development and installed the Alpha release of Opera 12. Your feedback has been invaluable.

When it comes to hardware acceleration, we're currently in a state of code cleanup and optimization, so there will not be many big changes coming in this area in the next weeks. This builds has a couple of very important fixes though, first among them is plugging a big memory leak on Windows.

Anyone running Opera 12 Alpha are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the build linked below.

Code cleanup and optimizations

Plugged a huge memory leak on Windows, and a smaller one on Mac

Several updates to blocklists. Note that many changes are continuously pushed through autoupdate, so you probably have these changes already

- Blocking use of hardware acceleration on NVIDIA Quadro NVS (bad performance)

- Blocking use of hardware acceleration on NVIDIA FX/PCX series (buggy driver version detection prevented blocking of the too old driver)

- Blocking use of 3D hardware acceleration (WebGL) on Intel GMA 3000 (bad performance)

- Added fallback rule for unknown chipsets on Windows as well, should block things like VMWare

Fixed ex value parsing on Mac, fixes many odd errors where things go missing on websites like reddit

Made "Minimal restart" in crashlog UI work again

Improved flash rendering on Mac

Fixed crash when closing tabs with "dimmed" dialogs

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

Windows

Mac

Linux/FreeBSD

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/10/20/hardware-acceleration-fixes

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Athlonite

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not a bad effort for an alpha build although I did notice whilst running the new beta version of Peacekeeper listed under HTML 5 there still isn't any h.264 video support

but decent score none the less

2788 Points

Detailed version information:

Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; Edition Next; en) Presto/2.9.220 Version/12.00

Suite

Result

Rendering

99.09

renderGrid01

199.60 fps

renderGrid02

197.99 fps

renderGrid03

39.07 fps

renderPhysics

62.44 fps

HTML5 Capabilities

5/6

webglSphere

Yes (55.61 fps)

videoPosterSupport

Yes

videoCodecH264

N/A

videoCodecTheora

Yes

videoCodecWebM

Yes

workerContrast01

Yes (2328.86 ops)

workerContrast02

Yes (2977.65 ops)

HTML5 Canvas

37.46

experimentalRipple01

56.74 fps

experimentalRipple02

24.73 fps

Data

26396.37

arrayCombined

5485.50 ops

arrayWeighted

127020.00 ops

DOM operations

15155.98

domGetElements

183500.00 ops

domDynamicCreationCreateElement

21819.00 ops

domDynamicCreationInnerHTML

43214.50 ops

domJQueryAttributeFilters

22163.00 ops

domJQueryBasicFilters

2480.00 ops

domJQueryBasics

2349.00 ops

domJQueryContentFilters

2479.50 ops

domJQueryHierarchy

28141.50 ops

domQueryselector

27069.50 ops

Text parsing

113428.84

stringChat

54520.00 ops

stringDetectBrowser

431942.50 ops

stringFilter

23500.00 ops

stringValidateForm

537885.50 ops

stringWeighted

63078.00 ops

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Grand Master

+Frank B. Subscriber²

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Smarter address field suggestions

We have already introduced address field search suggestions powered by our partners Google (default), Bing, ?????? (Yandex), and Wikipedia (English only). Now we want our own address field suggestions to meet the same high quality standards as the ones provided by our partners for your bookmarks and history entries.

In our old system; everything including bookmarks was matched against page URL, title, or page content and then ordered in one giant list sorted by last visited time.

The new system assigns a score to each suggestion based on more factors than just the last visited time. For example, we prioritize your bookmarks, the position in the URL where we find a match, and the number of times we get a match on the page.

We are not done yet, and will work on integrating Speed Dials and further improve the scoring system.

What do you think about the new results in the address field? Are we getting you to where you wanted to go?

PS: There are some other treasures in the change log as well. smiley.gif

Known issues

  • Mail header layout is broken
  • Mac: File uploading, and large network requests never finishes
  • Mac: Some font rendering issues and crashes with Web fonts

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

Source and full change log: Opera Desktop Team blog

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+Frank B. Subscriber²

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Ook!

Ook! I'm Dustin Wilson, and I'm a user experience designer for desktop here at Opera. You've probably seen my lurking around here before. I've been with the My Opera community since 2003, and I've been quite a vocal supporter of Opera. I just started working here on the 11th of January, and shortly thereafter I flew out to Oslo to meet and work with everyone. It's been extremely cold and dark, but great. I'm working with a great team, and we have a lot of awesome stuff planned. Fortunately for you all there are some nice design changes coming up! Stay tuned!

Why am I writing this post, then? They just needed a scapegoat person to write an intro to this Opera Next snapshot, and I was readily available and willing to do so. I'm perfectly sure this build contains many worthwhile changes! Have fun testing the build.

Known issues

  • Mail header layout is broken
  • Mac: Some font rendering issues, and crashes with Web fonts

Source and full change log: Opera Desktop Team blog

Download:

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+Frank B. Subscriber²

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Address field adjustments

Recently I have been working on improvements in the address field. The main UI related complaint was that Opera didn't show the full address any more, even when there is room for it. That was true; in 11.6x versions the length was limited to around 1/3 of the address field length.

As a result, we have replaced the 3 column solution (icon, URL, title) with 2 columns. The first column contains the icon (no, not favicon yet), and the second column contains the text. This text includes the address, page title, and optional page excerpt (when the row contains information provided by history results). In cases where there is not enough space, we still cut the text.

We have also improved bolding rules, and provided new colors.

For bookmarks fans, we have further adjusted bookmark prioritization when ordering them in the drop down.

scr.png

Please remember that work here is still ongoing, and further improvements are planned.

Known issues

  • Further improvements to contrast and formatting are still being considered
  • Favicons are not displayed and there is currently no option to bring them back
  • Important parts of URLs can be cut off, if there is not enough space
  • Mac: Some font rendering issues, and crashes with Web fonts

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

Source: Opera Desktop Team blog

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Marshall Veteran

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Core update with Do Not Track, and mail and theme fixes

This is an Opera 12 (Wahoo) snapshot.

As you can see from the changelog, this build introduces quite a few fixes, changes and improvements. Since there's a lot of it, I'll highlight a few important things below.

Privacy

This Wahoo builds adds support for Do Not Track, which allows browser users to opt out of being tracked on the web. It is currently disabled by default, but can be enabled by enabling the following option in Opera's Preferences dialog: "Preferences > Advanced > Security > Ask websites not to track me"

Note that this will only work if the site actually honors the request. Few sites currently do, and the effect of DNT will have to be evaluated to see if it is a viable solution in the long run.

SSL performance

This build also introduces a first round of optimizations for faster SSL handling (CORE-41667):

TCP optimization to eliminate roundtrips

Improved session negotiation to save on waiting times

Improved connection handling which improves both HTTP and HTTPS connections

Quicker closing of connections allows for new connections at an earlier stage

Parallelizing OCSP/CRL uses half as much time to do revocation checking

Strict transport security improves security and will also improve speed when servers start using this feature

As an example, the first load at skandiabanken.no was reduced by one second or more. With 10 subsequent page loads, the time to open the page was almost cut in half in total.

XHR

With CORE-41784 (XMLHttpRequest Level 2 upload and progress events), we completed our support for progress events in XMLHttpRequest, for upload, download, and timeout update. This will improve the upload experience on Google services (no more Flash uploaders on YouTube and Gmail), and more sites are to follow.

More

There are numerous other improvements, including Core, mail and theme fixes. Take a look at the changelog for more information.

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

Source

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Grand Master

+Frank B. Subscriber²

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Improving the stability of Wahoo (12.00)

It has been a little over a week since the last Wahoo (12.00) snapshot, so here is a shiny, new update. smiley.gif

As you might expect, internally work continues apace on Hardware Acceleration and other upcoming features. For this snapshot however the focus is improving stability and as such there are several key crash fixes.

In terms of feedback we primarily interested in any new regressions you notice since the previous Wahoo snapshot (12.00-1301), so please keep on topic and let us know if you find anything.

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

Source: Opera Desktop Team blog

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Marshall Veteran

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Finally some hardware acceleration fixes

Our latest work package with hardware acceleration fixes has been in the pipeline for a long time for several reasons, but it has finally landed in mainline. Wahoo!

This work package is especially nice for Mac users, who will see major improvements to fonts now that we are using Apples Core Text api for everything except font management.

Let me also take this opportunity to thank you all for your great support and feedback over the years. After we started this blog early in 2006, communication with you, our users, improved dramatically. Alas, this week is my last week with Opera, it is time for me to move on. To quote my then colleague Wilhelm: So long, and thanks for all the bugs.

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

Source

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Athlonite

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the latest snapshot version 12.00.1417 gives you the choice of either OpenGL or DirectX for acceleration but it's not turned on by default

opera:config#Enable%20Hardware%20 Acceleration 1 for on 0 for off (software mode)

and

opera:config#Preferred%20rende rer set to 0 for OpenGL rendering or 1 for DirectX rendering mode

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Grand Master

+Zlip792 MVC

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Today when I uninstalled Opera Developer Channel, since I use it only time to time for finding changes and difference and answering other people question, it opened survey page on IE (InPrivate browsing). While IE was not opened at all before.. Something interesting...

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Denis W. Veteran

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That's a pleasant surprise. I remember reading about that disgruntled ex-Opera employee who claimed Linux builds were out of consideration.

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